My first message in the list. I've actually just "joined the team",
according to LP anyway.

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I have been using Zim for while and it is an amazing productivity tool!
I also use GNOME Shell with its great search capabilities. I thought it
would be great to be able to search through my Zim notebook directly
from Shell search, so I went ahead and developed a very simple search
provider [2]. It seems to be working, but I'm very new to almost
everything involved: although I have some programming background, I'm
new to python, DBUS, GNOME Shell, Zim itself and even Git. I basically
did a patchwork of a few tutorials I found about that stuff, so
certainly there is much room for improvement.

The workings are very simple: zimsearch.py is a python 3 script that
implements a gtk3 application [3]. This app is DBus-activatable [4] and
does nothing except creating a DBus object that impements the GNOME
Shell search provider API. The service implementation basically spawns
"zim --search" with the search terms and parses the stdout. There is
some logic to identify the default notebook from notebooks.zim and to
override the searched notebook from a special search term
(notebook:...). Apart from the script, there are some descriptors to
install the provider in DBus and GNOME Shell.

If you would like to try it, I've make a script that installs the files
to their directories. It Works For Me, but no guarantees otherwise.
Please contact me if you are having trouble with the installation.